Rich snippets are additional pieces of information that the search engine is able to identify on the page, used to enhance the searcher’s understanding of the value of that page. Ratings, pricing, and availability are commonly seen in ecommerce rich snippets.

Rich Snippets is the term used to describe structured data markup that site operators can add to their existing HTML, which in turn allow search engines to better understand what information is contained on each web page. However, the major search engines have taken this a step further, and now use this markup to present richer search results, enabling users to more easily find the information they are looking for.

The rich snippet can provide searchers with more detailed information with their search queries. For example, search listings for a restaurant may show average reviews and price ranges, while a search result for a recipe may show information like average prep time and caloric information.

Rich Snippets provide a small sample of a site’s content on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) of search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. They enhance your search listing, making it more enticing for users to click on and easier for search engines to extract information. Adding Rich Snippets to your site won’t affect the appearance or content of your pages; rather, everything is done behind the scenes in your site’s HTML code. To display Rich Snippets, you just need to tweak the code of your website with some additional tags.

Rich snippets are most commonly the result of semantic markup found in the source code of the page.

The semantic markup describes the meaning of the text. The poster child for rick snippets and semantic markup is the Recipes schema. By identifying elements of the recipe such as thumbnail image, ratings, ingredients, instructions, cook time, prep time and so on, Google can parse what it finds and construct a rich snippet search result.

Snippets are the lines of black text that accompany every search result listing. They describe the page’s relevance to the phrase that the searcher used as his search query, with the words that match the query shown in bold as shown below.

Rich cards and rich snippets both use structured data markup to produce enhanced SERP displays, presenting page content in a more meaningful and appropriate way to Google Search users.Rich snippets are additional pieces of information that the search engine is able to identify on the page, used to enhance the searcher's understanding of the value of that page.

If you have something to sell and a published price, you can put rich snippets to work for your site. The markup code that helps search engines classify the information for rich snippets can be easily inserted into your page templates so that the code appears on every relevant page on the site.